Tenth illustration for A Tale of Two
Cities in A Tale of Two Cities, American Notes,
Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens Library Edition (1910), vol. 13,
facing p. 104.

Although film actors as talented as Barry Morse and Christopher
Lee have tackled with gusto and aplomb the role of the villainous Marquis de St.
Evrémonde, thereby shaping present-day readers' conceptions of this unpleasant
exemplar of the decadent French aristocracy prior to the revolution, Furniss's
illustration directly reflects the text itself and the illustrations by Phiz and
Barnard. [Commentary continued below.]

[You may use these images without prior permission for any
scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link
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Web in a print one.]

Passage Illustrated

The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,
and the precious little bells went ringing down-stairs. There was soon but one person
left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm and his snuff-box in his hand,
slowly passed among the mirrors on his way out.

"I devote you," said this person, stopping at the last door on his way, and
turning in the direction of the sanctuary, "to the Devil!"

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the dust
from his feet, and quietly walked down-stairs.

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and
with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every feature in it
clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose, beautifully formed otherwise, was
very slightly pinched at the top of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints,
the only little change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing
colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted by something like
a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of treachery, and cruelty, to the whole
countenance. Examined with attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be
found in the line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much too
horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a handsome face, and a
remarkable one. [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Seven, "Monseigneur in the City,"
p. 101]

Left: John McLennan's periodical illustration of the Marquis found stabbed
in his enormous bed, "This, from Jacques". Middle: Sol
Eytinge, Junior's dual character study of the family's representatives of the
Enlightenment and the Old Regime respectively, Charles Darnay and
The Marquis (1867). Right: A. A. Dixon's realisation of the accident scene in St.
Antoine, "Killed!" shrieked the man" (1905). [Click on
images to enlarge them.]

Commentary

Although at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1899 Furniss undoubtedly enjoyed
Bond's performance as the egotistical, plotting aristocrat who dominates the opening
scene in The Only Way, the Freeman Wills/Langbridge scripted
stage-adaptation, this scene occurs early in the play, in the "Prologue — A Loft in
a Farm Building," and therefore well in the past, when the brothers St. Evrémonde
were young scions of the aristocracy enjoying under the guise of feudal privilege the
license to rape and murder a suffering peasantry, and the bourgeois Doctor Manette was a
young physician bent on doing good for the classes upon whom the aristocracy preyed. For
Furniss's inspiration, one must look, then, to the original monthly and the Household
Edition illustrations primarily.

By the time that the reader encounters two studies of the Marquis — the
portrait bust and the larger, full-length study of an inflexible gentleman bowing —
the reader has already encountered the textual description, so that the tenth
illustration sits, as it were, between two chapters dealing with the decadent,
pre-revolutionary French aristocracy of two types: "Monseigneur in Town" and "Monseigneur
in the Country." The Marquis St. Evrémonde straddles both the sophisticated world
of the Parisian salon and the feudal world of the country chateau. He is not so much an
individual as a type, but Dickens and his illustrators particularize him effectively.
As the author wrote to Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton on 5 June 1860,

I see no reason to doubt, but on the contrary, many reasons to believe,
that some of these privileges [accorded French noblemen of great rank] had been used to
the frightful oppression of the peasant, quite as near to the time of the Revolution as
the doctor's narrative, which, you will remember, dates long before the Terror [i. e.,
3 September 1793-28 July 1794]. And surely when the new philosophy was the talk of the
salons and the slang of the hour, it is not unreasonable or unallowable to suppose a
nobleman wedded to the old cruel ideas, and representing the time going out, as his
nephew represents the time coming in. . . . [Pilgrim Letters,
vol. 9: 258-259]

Since, as the editors of the Pilgrim Letters assert, le
droit du Seigneur is "the foundation of the plot" (9: 259, note 1), the portrait of
the Marquis must be absolutely credible, not merely (as is the case with his carriage's
running over a peasant child or harnessing peasants to carts) founded on historical
research and in particular The French Revolution (1837) by
Thomas Carlyle, but supported
emphatically in the narrative by the Marquis' actual actions and utterances. The portrait
of the individual must stand for the worst excesses of an entire class, and yet remain
that of an individual. Thus, Dickens in writing to John Forster when sending him the
proofs of the weekly 27 August 1859 number remarked that his challenge in writing this
historical novel was to make

a picturesque story, rising in every chapter with characters true
to nature, but whom the story itself should express, more than they should express
themselves, by dialogue. [Pilgrim Letters, vol. 9: 112]

Readers of the serial published in the All the Year Round weekly would have, reasoned Dickens, only the
benefit of the dialogue in construing the characters as if they were actual historical
personages rather than literary constructs serving the interests of plot and theme. On
the other hand, purchasers of the monthly instalments also had the benefit of such
Phiz illustrations as The Stoppage at the Fountain in Phiz's pair of illustrations
for Part Three, August 1859, to judge for themselves, without the intervention of the
omniscient narrator, the insensitive and brutal nature of the spirit behind the fine
mask and elegant facade. Although at first the reader might easily lose him in The
vortex of anguished humanity swirling about his Rococo carriage, the positioning of the
inquisitive nobleman above the heads of the devastated Gaspard and his comforter, the
towering Ernest Defarge, makes his a memorable portrait, callous and unmoved by the
consequences of his rashness.

Whereas this is the Marquis' only appearance in Phiz's narrative-pictorial sequence,
John McLenan in Harper's Weekly and
Fred Barnard in Household Edition both had the space to offer
several visual interpretations of the Marquis. In He stooped at little, the nobleman, again in his carriage (and
again with a scowling visage), regards with contempt the common herd surrounding his
carriage as he nears his chateau (Book Two, Chapter Eight); immediately following this
group study is Barnard's individual portrait of the smooth-faced aristocrat like a marble
statue in "Drive him fast to his
tomb. This, from Jacques." (Book Two, Chapter Nine). Stabbed through the heart
while sleeping in his ornate bed under sumptuous covers and satin sheets, the Marquis
still has his nose in the air. McLenan's single study of the dead Marquis, This, from Jacques,
communicates far less about the Marquis class-consciousness, arrogance, and egotism.

These qualities in the well-fed but sinister face Sol Eytinge communicates effectively
by contrasting the sumptuously dressed chocolate-sipping uncle with the manly, open
nephew whose stance seems to suggest that he, enlightened thinker of the new age, judges
his uncle and his excesses somewhat harshly — as the reader is inclined to do
— in Charles Darnay and The
Marquis (the screen in the background, as in McLenan's illustration,
suggestive of the dark secrets in the decadent nobleman's past that one day must be
brought to light).

Whereas Dixon's illustration of the Marquis, gazing placidly out his carriage window at
the raving father of the dead child, in
'Killed!' shrieked the man better represents the gorgeous carriage than it does
the haughty Marquis or the oppressed proletariat, Harry Furniss's study completely
detaches the arrogant but fastidiously dressed nobleman from any particular moment in the
narrative. He is placed, as it were, under a microscope for the reader to examine as a
representative of a dying species. The reader, encountering the dual images in the text,
after meeting the description of the Marquis some pages earlier, must initially wonder why
he appears twice: in the upper-left corner as a portrait bust, and in the main
illustration seeming to bow, but with a look of extreme distaste on his face suggestive of
his attitude towards his rival, "Monseigner in town," he who drinks chocolate in an
elaborate ceremony. The reader of 1910 might well have been impressed by the fidelity with
which Furniss has realised the late eighteenth-century fashion: fob, lace cuffs, silk
stockings, brocade town-coat, and elegant, white-powdered wig, and the rapier — a
gentleman's weapon. As he scowls right, he begins to lift his lorgnette, as if he cannot
decide whether his adversary is worth such close attention. On the page opposite, the
strategically placed text from the very end of chapter seven is to be read against this
telling image of the vain and derisive representative of the upper class:

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick succession;
the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the Doctor, the Lawyer, the
Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous
flow, came whirling by. The rats had crept out of their holes to look on, and they
remained looking on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the
spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through which they peeped.
The father had long ago taken up his bundle and hidden himself away with it, when the
women who had tended the bundle while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there
watching the running of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball- when the one woman
who had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness of Fate. The
water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran into evening, so much life in
the city ran into death according to rule, time and tide waited for no man, the rats were
sleeping close together in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at
supper, all things ran their course. [Book Two, "The Golden Thread," Chapter Seven,
"Monseigneur in the City," p. 104]